


Zenyatta Mondatta

by greygerbil



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-09-07 06:50:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8787916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: In a world where the omnic crisis never happened and omnics are still servants to humans, Genji becomes aware of an omnic in his father's household with an odd name and more personality than a machine should have.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Genyatta Week 2016, prompt "AU".

Genji had always hated being sick, not only for the obvious reasons. Inactivity didn’t suit him, so he ended up giving into the temptation to continue his normal life and eventually extended the whole unpleasant situation for much longer than needed. Of course, he should know better by now, as both Hanzo and his father were always ready to remind him, the former with annoyance, the latter with indulgent amusement; but heart and brain went in two different directions, as his grandmother would have put it.

This time, he had decided to ignore a cold until it had opened the gates for a vicious flu to take over and leave him bedbound. Too weak to do more than drag himself to the bathroom if absolutely necessary, he was left in the care of an omnic for the time being.

If Genji had ever seen the omnic before, he hadn’t really taken note of it. It was your standard service model dressed in a black yukata as all the mechanical servants of the Shimada were. Its faceplate was simple, only remarkable maybe for the downward slant of its eyes, which gave it a somewhat benevolent look. It carried in hot soup and tea and medicine and got rid of Genji’s tissue papers, all without talking. Like all the others, it had, Genji assumed, been instructed to only speak when spoken to or when it was absolutely necessary.

The omnic also cleaned his room silently around Genji, dusting off his shelves full off video games, bringing in clothes which he hung up in the small adjacent chamber that functioned as a wardrobe, and polishing Genji’s swords.

“Do you usually clean my room?” Genji asked, on the second day, because he was bored out of his mind and too sick to do literally anything but watch the omnic move back and forth.

“Yes, Master Genji,” the omnic said. Its voice was as benign as what passed for its face.

Strange that he’d never seen it, Genji considered, but then, it probably chose to come in when Genji was out as to not disturb him.

“Hey, you can go outside, right?”

There were a couple highly specialised cooks and gardener omnics with expensive modifications which were worth too much to just have them running about, considering they could be stolen off the streets, but this one looked cheap. Genji thought that it would probably just be trashed instead of repaired once its vital parts started breaking, since it wouldn’t be worth the cost and hassle to have it fixed.

“Yes, Master Genji. Do you need me to get anything for you?”

“You know the _konbini_ down the road towards the arcade? They have packaged _kinpira tsukune_ which are great, I want those.”

The plastic-wrapped chicken patty rice balls where one of his go-to foods when he came home with a hang-over and always made him feel a bit better (provided he did not get sick from adding food on top of the copious amounts of alcohol). Perhaps they could to the same now.

“Of course. But can you even taste them?” the omnic asked, slightly curious.

That was something Genji hadn’t given any thought.

“Good call,” he muttered, turning his face into the pillow. With this flu, everything just tasked like cardboard. Then, he looked up again. “What’s your name? You got one?”

Some omnics still went by their sell code, but in order not to have to remember long rows of numbers, his father usually named them when they came into the household.

“Zenyatta,” the omnic said, having lowered the feather duster it was carrying.

“That’s an odd name.”

He couldn’t imagine his father had picked that one. He usually took them at random out of a list of trees and flowers.

“I didn’t name myself.”

Genji chuckled, which made him cough. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said that Zenyatta had been giving him a bit of sarcastic backtalk. Probably just stating facts, though. It was, after all, only an omnic.

“As far as I know, it refers to a 20th century music album my first master liked,” Zenyatta elaborated. “I don’t know it, though.”

“Huh.”

Genji listened to a lot of music, but he had never heard of anything called ‘Zenyatta’, either. Then again, they didn’t exactly play 20th century music where he went to go clubbing; that stuff was ancient. Taking his phone from the bedside table, he considered that this was at least something for him to do: find out where this omnic got its name from.

-

“I found the album,” Genji announced to Zenyatta in the evening, when it put down a plate with _shiro miso_ soup and a plain bowl of rice in front of him.

“Album?”

Zenyatta tilted its head a little as it looked at Genji, who pushed himself up on one arm and showed Zenyatta the image on his phone, a garish orange-and-blue cover that might once have been on an old vinyl or CD (Genji really didn’t know what they’d used like eighty years ago, mediums had changed so fast then).

“Third album by some English rock band called ‘The Police’, _Zenyatta Mondatta_. Not too bad, actually, for old music like that.” He’d listened to some of it while dozing through the afternoon. “Although if you’re Zenyatta, where is Mondatta?”

“I – don’t know.”

The hitch in Zenyatta’s voice made Genji look back up from his phone at it. Genji had been joking, but Zenyatta’s tone had grown quite heavy as it had answered. Now that it had Genji’s attention, it quickly busied itself with the food again, rearranging it unnecessarily on the tray.

“Is there actually a Mondatta?”

“Yes,” Zenyatta said, slowly. “There was. You could call him a brother to me, in human terms.”

“Well, that can mean a lot of things,” Genji muttered, thinking about his and Hanzo’s floundering relationship.

“We were produced by the omnium quite close to one another, and sold to a factory together. Eventually they went bankrupt and we went for sale again. I do wonder what became of him.”

“You sound like you miss him.”

“It is difficult to be separated from someone you have spent your entire existence with.”

Genji wondered if Zenyatta was speaking of physical proximity. It was an omnic, right? They couldn’t really miss anyone. Yet Zenyatta sounded so bereft when it spoke of Mondatta. Sure, it wasn’t the first time that an omnic had seemed pretty lifelike to Genji – they reacted appropriately when scolded and praised and such. However, he had never had a conversation with one before where he’d ventured into territories where it made no sense for them to be programmed a certain way. A master might want to have them look happy or sad when they tried to educate them, but why would Zenyatta have an option to get attached to another omnic?

“It doesn’t matter for you, Master Genji.” Zenyatta approached the door. “Please call me if you need me for anything else… and perhaps I may listen to the music at some point.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Genji said, automatically. It was silly, but something inside him wanted to make the machine feel better.

-

The next day, Genji was good enough to sit up, but walking still left him dizzy. At least his head didn’t hammer quite so much anymore, though, and since he’d been itching to play a video game while his illness had kept him out of the arcades, he immediately went to put that plan into action.

 _Forgotten Kingdom_ , a one-against-one brawler set in a fantasy version of 16th century Japan, was his favourite at the moment, but it proved to be rather boring without friends over. Online multiplayer had never appealed to him much. He liked the social aspect of having his opponent around in person, especially if there was an audience to cheer. He was hardly going to ask Hanzo, though, since he had decided at seven years old that he was now too mature for video games, and Genji’s friends all had better things to do than get a nasty flu virus from him. Besides, Genji did not want to be seen by them weak and pale and with circles under his eyes, either; they were not that close, after all.

He had just resigned himself to playing with fourteen year olds screaming insults they had just learned into their headsets when he remembered Zenyatta. It was pretty good to talk to, for an omnic, and while it wouldn’t be much of a challenge, Genji found himself suddenly interested in knowing how an omnic would handle a video game. Would it find it fun, or would it at least know to pretend it did?

Genji called Zenyatta over through the intercom system. It appeared in the door, its hands folded before its body, silently waiting for a command.

“Sit down here,” Genji ordered, pointing on the empty spot on the broad bed he slept in, which could have easily contained three people (and, in fact, sometimes had).

The omnic glanced at the mattress for a moment in what Genji thought would have been confusion on a human’s face, but it listened. It was kind of weird how gracefully it moved, Genji thought, considering how crude all those thick wires and pistons showing in Zenyatta’s build were. Genji handed it a second controller.

“Have you ever played a video game?”

“It would surprise me if anyone intended for that to be part of my tasks,” Zenyatta said mildly.

Genji looked at it through narrowed eyes. Yeah, that machine definitely had a bit of an attitude, even if it still sounded friendly. Genji liked that.

“Well, it is now. You’ve got to entertain your master.”

Zenyatta awkwardly fitted his metal fingers around the smooth edges of the controller which was meant to mould itself against human skin.

“I cannot claim proficiency, but I will give my best.”

Apparently, Zenyatta’s best wasn’t actually that bad. Genji won their fights, but his plan to go easy on Zenyatta had to be scrapped early on. He realised that the omnic wasn’t subject to the human problem of forgetting the intricate button combinations for special moves, since presumably it stored that all up in its electronic brain; and while it did not know much about positioning, it lacked all of the frantic panic that led human beginners to do lots of button mashing when things got tricky.

Eventually, Zenyatta set the controller down. “I have to leave,” it said. “My assistance is required in the kitchen around this time of day. Thank you for letting me play with you, Master Genji.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“It is quite entertaining, but rather brutal, too. Are all video games like that?”

A simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed to make an owner happy, Genji thought, and wondered again what the purpose of Zenyatta’s programming was. He supposed he had to admit that it was much more interesting like this, though.

“No, I got this farming simulation one, for example… and all sorts of other stuff. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

Zenyatta rather sounded like it meant that.

-

“Okay, see, now that we have put the egg in the incubator for the night, there is a chick the next morning.”

“How wonderful!”

It amused Genji greatly how entranced Zenyatta seemed by this cartoon simulation. He let his farmer character pet the baby chicken before he led the avatar out into the farmlands again to tend to the carrots. This was the kind of game Genji usually played after a sleepless night out, when his brain was flatlining and he happily sank into the fake idyllic fantasy. Zenyatta, however, seemed much more passionate about it than he had about the fighting game.

Genji had slowly started to think about Zenyatta as ‘him’ in the preceding two days. He didn’t know whether Zenyatta had any parts that distinguished him as male, and for some reason he felt weird asking the machine that seemed so much like a thinking human to just open his yukata to satisfy his curiosity. He had a male-sounding voice, though, and ‘he’ in any case was a bit more fitting than ‘it’.

“Do you want to play?” Genji asked, gesturing at him with the controller.

“I enjoy simply watching you,” Zenyatta answered, settling in next to him again.

-

On the third day of Genji’s road to recovery, they were playing a point and click game. Genji did a lot better than usual. It seemed to him that Zenyatta’s calm nature tempered his own impatience, which usually kept him from being even decent at games like this. The omnic sat beside him giving clues or thinking out loud, until he glanced at the nightstand.

“I should go and fetch you some new tea. This must have grown cold by now.”

With a fluid motion, Zenyatta got up out of the bed and left the room with quick steps.

Genji watched him leave. The second thing that had happened to Genji after he had thought a bit harder about Zenyatta’s possible gender was that he had considered what it would be like to sleep with the omnic. It wasn’t like he had ever pretended not to be a bit of a dog and he had taken people to bed who he found much less likeable than Zenyatta.

However, the fact of the matter was that Zenyatta would probably feel like Genji asking him to sleep with him was an order he was not allowed to refuse. Even knowing full well he was projecting human feelings onto him that a machine like Zenyatta didn’t have, Genji couldn’t bring himself to do it. Zenyatta seemed to like him, and though nothing Genji could do should change that program running its course, since it was probably designed to flatter the owner, Genji had a foolish notion that Zenyatta wouldn’t look upon him with as much benevolence anymore.

Zenyatta returned with his tea cup as Genji had just switched back to the farming simulation, tired of straining his flu-addled brain with logic puzzles. Just through the doorway, Zenyatta stumbled over the cord of the controller, making a surprised noise. Genji cringed away to avoid splash damage from the tea.

However, nothing came. Zenyatta had stretched out his hand as he stumbled forward. It did not reach the cup, but the cup stayed in the air regardless, only a few droplets spilling over the sides as it righted itself held up by nothing but air before Zenyatta grabbed it.

Genji stared at the omnic in confusion. Zenyatta, who was holding the cup with both hands now, had grown very still, like a mouse in front of a snake.

“How the hell did you do that?” Genji asked.

There was a long pause.

“It is a talent I have,” Zenyatta said, carefully. “It’s not very useful, except for moments like this.”

Obviously, the omnic was afraid and Genji understood. Even he, who liked Zenyatta, immediately considered the danger of an omnic with unpredictable, unknown powers. Other masters might have seen it as a reason to deactivate him immediately.

“I’ve never heard of an omnic who can make things levitate,” Genji said. “Was that included in your list of features?”

“No. It’s an ability I achieved through mental focus. It doesn’t seem to be mechanical,” the omnic explained, with an air of resignation about him.

That sounded unlikely, but who was Genji to say that? He controlled a bloodline-bound spirit dragon that jumped out of his skin through a tattoo – he was well aware that the real world was a little more mystical than people may have wanted to believe in their age of science.

There was such trepidation in the way Zenyatta held himself that Genji felt like he needed to say something. Maybe he was just a machine, but Genji pitied him. He hadn’t done anything but save Genji’s tea, that was hardly a reason to have him scrapped.

“Relax, Zenyatta,” he said, “I’m not going to tell anyone. It will be our secret. I doubt you will be a danger to my family.”

“Thank you, Master Genji. I have no intentions of hurting anyone,” Zenyatta answered, bowing deeply after he had placed down the tea.

“Good. Now come, you have to choose which cow we buy.”

As Zenyatta lowered himself down on the bed and began contemplating the choice of fat little pixel calves, Genji looked at him from the corner of his eyes. No, he was an odd machine, but there was no danger from him.

-

“I can’t wait to get out of this room!”

Genji pulled on a green shirt that matched his hair. At the other end of the room, Zenyatta was bringing his video game collection back in order. Genji had ended up being stuck here for a full week which had seemed like eternity to him.

“I am happy you are well, Master Genji.”

Zenyatta sounded honest and by this point, Genji had stopped reminding himself that it was probably just a program that was supposed to please him with its answers. Considering that Zenyatta, in his own quiet way, challenged him sometimes as well, that program seemed sort of spotty anyway, if it was only that, so he might as well take Zenyatta’s answers as genuine.

“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” Genji asked Zenyatta, wrapping a scarf around his neck. No way was he going to risk another cold after this ordeal; although with Zenyatta’s company, it had not been quite as boring as expected.

“Me?” Zenyatta contemplated. “I heard there is a garden in the west of the city with a lot of cherry trees and a _karetaki_. But I doubt that is an idea that will be very appealing to you.”

The last sentence was added with some trace of humour in the mechanical voice and Genji grinned. Zenyatta already knew him well.

“I guess it’s the right time for viewing cherry blossoms,” Genji said. He wasn’t a child anymore, so he usually only cared in the capacity of how drunk he could get during the accompanying hanami street festivals. However, thinking back on the simple joy Zenyatta had showed even just seeing the seasons change in their farming simulation, he found himself suddenly wanting to watch the omnic experiencing something new in the real world. If he’d worked in a factory before, he’d probably never been allowed to freely move around a park, and even here, he would have been mostly confined to the grounds of Hanamura Castle, which had cherry trees in the inner courtyards, but was still quite confined.

“The doctor did say I should take it easy at first,” Genji noted.

-

“You’re going where?” his father asked.

“Takao Gardens,” Genji repeated, as if this was not a completely surprising development. “I wanted to see the cherry blossoms.”

“And what are you taking the omnic for?”

Where his father was just confused at Genji’s sudden interest in nature, Hanzo seemed more sceptical.

“That’s my secret.”

His father viewed him from his place at the _kotatsu_ , then huffed in amusement and shook his head, the way he always did at Genji’s more outlandish ideas. Even Hanzo, who, as usual, seemed to want to find fault with him, really had no argument against Genji doing something as singularly peaceful as visiting a public park with a harmless service omnic.

With Zenyatta following behind him, Genji walked to the parking lot and slid into his sleek black car.

“Thank you again, Master Genji. It will be so interesting to see the place in person.”

“If you can actually make me believe some trees and a dry waterfall are interesting, I promise I’ll take you again,” Genji said and earned a little chuckle in return.

The car purred to life under him. He pulled it out of the gate, which opened after a press on a remote.

“Hey, there’s something else I wanted to ask. Do you know Mondatta’s code?”

“Yes,” Zenyatta said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, my father knows the woman who leads the city’s registration office. They’ve got databases to track property ownership and all that, including access to the global database of omnics. I was thinking maybe I could ask her to run the code, see if we can’t track Mondatta down.” If a Shimada asked, there would be no resistance, despite the fact that obtaining this information through a registrar was illegal.

“Really?” Zenyatta sounded baffled.

“Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s possible he slipped through the cracks because his owner didn’t register him properly, but it’s worth a try, at least.”

Also, he would have been deleted if he had been scrapped, but Genji didn’t want to say that.

“You have my thanks, Master. It would really put my mind at ease just to know where he is.” Zenyatta hesitated. “Although – may I ask why are you doing all of this for me?”

Genji shrugged his shoulders and reached into his pocket, unearthing the microchip with the album _Zenyatta Mondatta_ on it which he slipped into the appropriate slot in the car, then pressed play on the touch screen.

“I guess I just like you.”


End file.
